I hear Zachary Quinto before I see him. The voice of the actor who played Mr Spock in the rebooted Star Trek films comes thundering through the closed door of the central London rehearsal building – a repurposed church – as I sit outside waiting. He’s rehearsing the climactic scene from the play Best of Enemies, a restaging of the infamous Sixties TV confrontation between novelist and essayist Gore Vidal (Quinto) and right-wing TV host William F Buckley. “The play moves at a tremendous clip,” Quinto tells me shortly after. “It feels like you’re sitting on top of a locomotive, and you have no choice but to stay there.” Judging by the combustible force I overheard, it certainly sounds that way.
The rehearsal breaks for lunch, and I am allowed in; Quinto follows me up a steep flight of steps to a small platform at the top of the building. He may have sounded ready for the Noël Coward Theatre, but the vibe is still very much “come as you are”: a pair of overalls and a beanie hat. The 45-year-old Quinto joined the production after its Broadway run, replacing Charles Edwards. Buckley, meanwhile, is played as before by David Harewood, in an intriguing piece of race-blind casting. Speaking to The Independent last year, Harewood described Best of Enemies as “tough”, noting that it included “an enormous amount of lines”. It’s certainly chewy material, a change of step from the genre work for which Quinto is best known – Heroes; American Horror Story; the Star Trekreboot. Written by James Graham, the play fictionalises the real-life 1968 ATV debates between Vidal and Buckley – a vitriolic sparring session which culminated in Vidal calling his opponent a “crypto-Nazi”, and Buckley threatening violence and calling Vidal – who identified as bisexual – a “queer”.
